Brian Moran comes to Elbow Room “to mess with people”.  His heroes are comedians (Jim Varney, Bill Murray) and game show hosts (Alex Trebek, Bob Barker)---figures who by some strange blend of smooth talk, quick wit, and a knack for playing the fool are able to bend their worlds towards both harmony and chaos. Brian has fully absorbed these influences, and the rambunctious class-clown energy he has been bringing to various art-focused day programs over the last decade-plus is a constant and necessary reminder to us all to not take this whole “art” thing too seriously.

When Brian shifts his attention from making his friends laugh to making marks on paper, his approach is decidedly casual.  More often than not, his mixed-media pieces begin as jokes or banal notes:  a playfully insulting doodle of a friend, a list of supplies for a holiday party, jokes from an imaginary roast, a taunting letter to Santa Claus.  He often treats his art as busywork, something to keep him occupied while his friends are focused on their own projects, and adds to each piece fitfully throughout the course of a day or week.  Eventually, as it is with most things in Brian’s imagination, the mundane slips into comic disarray; Someone slips on a banana peel, the host tosses the script, Thanksgiving dinner becomes a foodfight, and little-by-little Brian’s tossed-off jokes and doodles accumulate into colorful bursts of phantasmagoric bathroom graffiti, infernal wisecracks in paint pen and smudge stick that billow like the dust in a cartoon brawl.  In his own words, making his art is “a pain in the ass, but someone’s gotta do it.”